The goal of this project is to elucidate the structure of wild-type mitochondrial genes and to gain an understanding about the events that occur between the transcription of mitochondrial DNA and the formation of functional tRNA molecules. We will use well characterized tRNA genes as probes to detect transcripts in wild type as well as mutant cells. These experiments should allow us to begin to elucidate the events necessary to express mitochrondrial tRNA genes in wild type cells.